As demonstrated by a weekend of immigrant Muslim terrorism in Minnesota, New York, and New Jersey, Mrs. Clinton has left herself a hostage to fortune. While still the overdog in the campaign, her repeatedly passing up opportunities to pivot away from the Establishment’s extremist conventional wisdom on border security, Donald Trump’s best issue, has left her at the mercy of events.

Trump is not a deep reader, but he has watched a whole lot of television news over the decades and appears to have a pretty accurate sense of the rhythm of events, of how often bad things are likely to happen. He has positioned himself on the issues to benefit from incidents like this weekend’s that, while they can’t be predicted exactly, can be foreseen statistically. With 48 days left until the election, that’s plenty of time for various more bad news that will hurt Hillary.

Meanwhile, Trump has triangulated in Hillary’s direction on her women’s issues like maternity leave, while nimbly staying strong on his core issue of borders. Trump understands not just Will Rogers’ Law of Holes, but also its counterpart: If you find yourself in a goldmine, don’t stop digging.

Hillary, though, has been stuck in a rut on borders, and just keeps digging.

Why is open borders looking more and more like the ditch she’s choosing to die in?

First, though, note that as the quasi-incumbent, Hillary is vulnerable to a number of different kinds of potential incidents, only some of which she and her allies have much control over.

“America now has a more-than-adequate supply of angry young Muslims. And the more the terrorier. ”

There are the usual risks over foreign or economic crises, such as the Sept. 15, 2008, financial crash that sank the McCain-Palin ticket. (It is now forgotten, but McCain had been narrowly ahead in the polls during the first two weeks of September.) Obama’s Fed appointee Janet Yellen, however, is unlikely to make Ben Bernanke’s mistake and allow interest rates to rise before the election.

Hillary and her friends also appear to have some control over the level of violence leftists unleash against Trump supporters. Last winter the mainstream media played up the meme of “violence at Trump rallies.” But in an age of cell-phone videos, it soon became evident that the vast majority of criminality was anti-Trump. Attacks by Mexican-flag-waving thugs in California on white women peacefully assembling to hear their candidate speak looked exceptionally bad.

By the time of the Republican convention, though, the Democrats appeared to have gotten the message out to their shock workers to ixnay on punching Trump supporters and smashing their cars, because chaos was turning into a vote-loser.

On the other hand, the media have been so berserk with anti-Trump rage lately that all the hate propaganda might stimulate another lone-nut-with-a-gun to try to save the world from Trump, the way that Hillary’s allies in Black Lives Matter helped get all those cops shot in July.

The ineffectual assassination attempt on Trump back in June has been stuffed down the media memory hole. Hillary’s partisans, other than some black ex-soldiers like the Dallas shooter, tend to be inept with guns and bombs.

But Hillary ought to worry about a worst-case scenario: a press-inspired shooting or bombing that leaves Trump wounded but triumphantly alive.

Still, Hillary can hardly ask her network allies to tone down their hate, because without the respectable press venting vitriol against Trump 24/7, where would she be? She’ll just have to take the risk that one of her supporters won’t wing Trump.

More Blacks Lives Matter supporters murdering cops would be another vote-loser for Hillary. Two more mass shootings like Dallas and Baton Rouge would be bad for her candidacy. On the other hand, the national media can bury single incidents of BLM-inspired killings as long as they transpire quickly. Cops get shot all the time, so who knows what inspired the shooters?

The nightmare scenario for Hillary is another drawn-out firefight like the one in Dallas that riveted the nation to their televisions.

Black riots, like the one in Milwaukee last month following a black cop shooting a black criminal, aren’t good for Hillary either. But the long hot summer of 2016 is finally cooling off as autumn begins. The BLM leadership and the media presumably have been notified to go easy on the outrage over any incidents of cops shooting blacks, like the latest in Tulsa, until after the election.

Still, the kind of blacks who might riot don’t read The New York Times and think the BLM top leadership are a bunch of careerist weirdos playing at being black. Thus, stoking black rage isn’t something that can necessarily be shut down when it’s tactically inconvenient for the Democrats.

From 2014 to 2016, the national murder rate is projected to increase by 31.5%...

That’s horrible.

But the good news from Hillary’s perspective is that it’s mostly black criminals being shot by black criminals following anti-police protests. So she can probably safely assume the press can obfuscate it a while longer, with claims such as that it’s happening primarily in Chicago. After all, what responsibility do Democrats bear for governing Chicago?

And besides, only 38 people were shot in Chicago this weekend. Maybe climate change will bring an early November blizzard to Chicago and slow down the slaughter?

The bigger risks for Hillary, however, involve border security, a complex of issues upon which she has refused to give ground despite Trump’s demonstration that borders matter to voters.

A notable long-term threat to the United States would be a rush by migrants to overwhelm the southern border, such as the flash-mob assault Europe endured in September 2015. We had a preview of that in the summer of 2014 when the Obama administration invited Central American juveniles to overwhelm the frontier.

No doubt, the White House has extensive contingency plans in the works over what to unleash upon the United States from Nov. 9, 2016, through Jan. 19, 2017, in case Trump wins. But, presumably, Mrs. Clinton has made it clear to Mr. Obama that he needs to keep the southern border calm through Election Day.

After that, though…

As we saw this weekend, however, Muslim terrorism is a more worrisome problem for Hillary. I would imagine that she has friends in the Persian Gulf who have assured her that they’ve directed their efforts to export their domestic troublemakers away from the U.S. through Nov. 8.

But America now has a more-than-adequate supply of angry young Muslims. And the more the terrorier.

Hillary and her allies in the news media are adamant about keeping voters from noticing that more Muslim immigrants means more terrorists. Correlation doesn’t prove causation! But that kind of pro-stupidity argumentation gets tiresome.

Since this weekend, Mrs. Clinton has been furiously trying to signal to the Potential Muslim Terrorist community that they’re just helping Trump. But the Allahu Akbar crowd tends to respond to its own erratic internal urges, so it’s by no means clear if she can talk all of them into delaying their next acts of butchery until after the election.

At this point, Hillary’s most obvious strategy is to rest up for the first debate, use her strong debating skills to lure Trump into the wonkish weeds, and hope that Trump’s masculine dominance ploys that worked well on Jeb won’t be that appealing to voters when used against a fragile but feisty old lady.

In 1593, Henri IV gave up Protestantism because the people of France wanted a king who was Catholic. “Paris is well worth a Mass,” he supposedly said.

Similarly, American voters seem to like having working borders. Would it kill Hillary to promise that?

But if it would, why?

Is it her Huma?

Or is it that elites too much these days resent their fellow countrymen as deplorable wastes of space to even pretend to wish them well? In The Guardian this week, for example, Yale economist Robert Shiller promises/threatens to war on the curse of “birthplace injustice”:

Next revolution will seek to overthrow privileges of nationhood

In other words, sure, you losers in West Virginia are descended from Americans who fought in every battle the United States has won from Yorktown to 73 Easting, but what have you done for me lately?

Personally, though, I kind of like having been born an American. And I am not all that enthusiastic about plotting with Professor Shiller against the American birthplace privilege of West Virginia hillbillies because I appreciate their ancestors fighting on my ancestors’ side. As Lincoln observed, “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave…” should be evocative. But who can remember such debts anymore?

And because I figure that if push ultimately comes to shove, I’d like to have some West Virginians on my descendants’ side, too.

Maybe I’d be more enthusiastic about our betters’ crusade to take away our birthplace privilege if I didn’t suspect it would just make them even more money than they already have.

Or is Hillary getting outmaneuvered by Trump, a 70-year-old political novice, because she is just too sick to innovate? Is she limited to the same old routines because it would be just too much work for her to come up with a response to the new realities? Is her staff too tipped toward yes-women?

One obvious question: Is Hillary’s husband, who showed impressive ability to adapt to new circumstances in the 1990s, too ill to give her good advice? Or is Bill kind of checked out, looking forward to getting back to his golf at Trump National? Or does she see this campaign as her chance to finally prove to him that their long-ago success was as much her doing as his?

SIGN UPDaily updates with TM’s latest

Copyright 2018 TakiMag.com and the author. This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order reprints for distribution by contacting us at editors@takimag.com.